


My Ruby

by creekycoffee



Category: South Park
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-06
Updated: 2016-07-06
Packaged: 2018-07-21 20:18:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7402411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creekycoffee/pseuds/creekycoffee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We don’t choose who we love.  We don’t pick who comes into our lives.  why do we laugh why do we cry,  why do we feel happiness and loneliness and despair.  The answer is simple we are human, and we are cursed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Ruby

We don’t choose who we love. We don’t pick who comes into our lives. why do we laugh why do we cry, why do we feel happiness and loneliness and despair. The answer is simple we are human, and we are cursed.

It happened to him when he was six or seven. Kenny was out playing in his back yard with his ball. Just hoofing it around when it went flying into the neighbors. The fence between the two houses was very tall to a seven year old and the only gap in it was next to a great tree growing in the middle of the boundary fence.

The fence had been erected either side as whoever originally built the houses had obviously decided the tree was too nice to cut down. So in his determined seven year old way Kenny slithered in between the tree and the fence nearly getting stuck and catching his leg on a nail on the way. He popped through with one final effort, and was just about to inspect his wounds when a voice from under the tree said “You’re bleeding”. On further inspection, there sat a little girl roughly Kenny’s age.

 

This didn’t come as any great surprise because Kenny already knew about Ruby. He’d heard his mother discussing there neighbors with her friends. Apparently her dad was a drinker and her mother had run off when she was tiny after her brother disappeared. Sometimes Kenny’s family hear the man yelling at Ruby when their windows were open. Kenny’s mother would just tut and shake her head and say “Poor little mite”. No one ever thought to step in though. That was just how it was.

 

“Come in the house and wash that cut” she said, and Kenny followed her meekly. While their houses must have been the same when they were first built, hers was dilapidated and scruffy, where kenny’s was bright and gleaming. She was just mopping up the blood from his wound when the front door banged. She went pale as milk and froze, and before either of them had time to think, her father came storming into the kitchen. Without a word he slapped her across the face sending her flying across the room.

“Get out of my house” he growled at Kenny and the boy in orange fled, back through the yard and through the fence as fast as his legs could carry him.  
That night the yelling from Ruby’s house was worse. Kenny lay in bed and covered his ears with his pillow. The next day he felt… no he had to find out how she was. Kenny slithered through the fence (more carefully this time) and sat under the big tree and waited for her, and in due time she came out of the house.

 

She was looking pale but seemed happy to see Kenny. He didn’t want to get her into trouble but she explained that, that morning she’d had a good long talk with her dad, and he’d agreed to stop drinking. She told him the tree was a magic tree and if you sat under it, and wished hard enough the things you wished for came true. She’d wished that her dad would stop hitting her, and now he wasn’t going to any more. What more did Kenny need as evidence? Plus Ruby was a whole six months older than Kenny as it turned out, so he was slightly in awe of her wisdom.

 

This became a pattern for them. After school they’d sit under the wishing tree and play stupid games or as they got older they’d talk. Sometimes Ruby put her head on Kenny’s shoulder while he told her all about his day, and other times they share the headphones on Kenny’s iPhone and listen to music. She always asked for Ruby by the Kaiser Chiefs. She playfully told Kenny they’d written it for her.

 

Kenny only remember ever having one argument and that was over his 13th birthday party. When he invited her. She promised to come but she never appeared. Kenny even braved knocking on the door (his mom would have killed him if he slithered through the fence in his best party clothes), but her father said she wasn’t home. After the party he changed and slithered through the fence, and there she was sitting under the tree. He was hurt and said as much. “What kind of friend was she any way to blow me off that way”?

 

“Look at me Ken. I mean really look at me” she said “l don’t belong with your friends’. And Kenny did look at her. The long wild orange hair tumbling down her back, the dark smudges that were her eyes, the clean but washed out dress that was obviously meant for a ten year old, as it barely covered her butt.

"I don’t have party clothes and I couldn’t bring you a present. I’m sorry”  
In that moment his heart thunked in his chest and Kenny fell in love as deeply as any 13 year old could.

“One day Ill take you away from this”. I promised. She sat under the wishing tree and said she wished he would.

 

The last conversation Kenny had with Ruby was again sitting under the wishing tree. He was heading off for university. He asked her why she didn’t leave too, but she said she had to stick around.

"I have to be here to remind my dad what a monster he is when he drinks” she said. But one day I’m gonna be free and leave this place. I haven’t forgotten what you promised’.

 

Neither had Kenny, but the heart could be fickle especially when its living in the pants, and during the time at university he met a girl named Ashley. Just before he graduated they found out that Ashley was pregnant, not really part of Kenny’s life plan but he was happy enough. They moved back to he’s folks and Kenny got a job in his dad’s factory. They were married.

 

The house next door was dilapidated and apparently Ruby’s father had died, and she had gone. During the next six months Kenny bought the house off his folks, and they downsized into something smaller as neither of them were getting any younger they said.

 

Then things started to get strange. Ashley and Kenny weren’t getting on well. Marry in haste repent at leisure as they said. Then one night last summer they were sitting in the garden. Kenny’s parents had put a garden swing under the wishing tree. It was no longer a thing of beauty, it was gnarled and dead. They were sitting there having one of those conversations where it turned out that everything wrong with Ashley’s life was Kenny’s fault, when during a break in the conversation, she suddenly put her head on his shoulder and started humming ‘Ruby’. The hairs on the back of Kenny’s neck stood up, and he just about leapt out of the seat.

 

“Oh God you’re giving me one of my heads” she snapped and stomped back into the house. Kenny thought about that a lot over the next few months. His Ruby and how much he missed her. What had really happened to her?  
Yesterday it came to a head. Over the winter the wishing tree had become unstable. It was dead and during a high wind a huge branch came smashing into the yard. He hired someone to come take it down. It was still relatively early in the morning when Kenny got a call at work from the police. Two bodies had been found buried under the wishing tree. The body of a 7 year old girl, and a ten year old boy with black hair. His Ruby, and what remained of her brother. Kenny flew home. It couldn’t be her. Kenny known her until she was much older than that. When he got home his folks were at his. The police had called them too as they were neighbors at the time of the “incident”.

 

Even his parents remembered that night. The argument after Ruby’s father had found kenny in the house, the screaming of a small child, they also remembered they hadn’t seen her since. They had informed the authorities at the time, something Kenny knew nothing about, but her father had said her mother had taken Ruby away and no one could prove otherwise.

 

Kenny thought about her telling him he couldn’t hit her any more, and that long conversation they had the next morning. She stayed to keep him off the drink. Kenny guess if anything would, it would be the nagging ghost of the child he murdered. Now that her body had been found he wondered if Ruby was finally free.

 

So back to the beginning. The flurry of emotions, and the curse that humans are.

 

Ashley had been away for a few days with their little boy, visiting the parents. She told Kenny she needed some space, and when she first arrived back in the morning her intention was to pack up everything and leave. In the space of a couple of hours Kenny had seen a huge change in her. Her usual control freak self, not a hair out of place. But now she’s in the other room , scouring the internet for holiday destinations. Within half an hour of being back she snuggled next to him, put her head on Kenny’s shoulder and asked if they could finally go away like he’d promised. Her hair is tumbling down her back and she has the Kaiser Chiefs blasting Ruby on the stereo. So what is Kenny going to do? Nothing. Take Ruby to see the world like he promised her when she was 13. Because life is cursed and there’s not a thing you can do about it.


End file.
